Modern Language Association 2025 (New Orleans, January 9 – 12, 2025): “Wallace Stevens & Classicism.”
There’s Jove’s “mythy mind” in “Sunday Morning,” Penelope’s meditative compositions in “The World as Meditation,” “Aeneas” bearing his father “from / The ruins of the past” in the uncollected “Tradition,” and a call-out to “Classical mythology” in general as “The greatest piece of fiction” toward the end of Adagia. Stevens invokes “Plato’s ghost” and “Aristotle’s skeleton” in “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”; he proposes and describes a “platonic person” in “The Pure Good of Theory”; he points to Plato and cites Socrates throughout his essays and letters. We find him freely, knowingly referring to Callimachus, Democritus, Parmenides, Sappho, Xenophon; to Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid.